Slashdot Mirror

SourceVisigoth asks: "The recent story on non-traditional keyboards got me thinking, what else is out there in terms of hardware with an interesting design? Is there anyone who specializes in making cases, keyboards, pointing devices, etc. out of unusual materials or with nonstandard colors or patterns? What about hardware that won't necessarily be more efficient, but simply looks cool? Apple is definitely onto something with the different colored iMacs and the G4 cubes, but someone must be doing this in the x86 world also. NCSX sells 'colorful shells' for the Dreamcast and Playstation, so there must be some demand for this kind of thing, especially among gamers. Not only would a glow-in-the-dark keyboard provide illumination for late-night coding, but nothing says 'I 0wN j00' like a box with racing stripes running down the side!" Gotta admit, something like this might make a nice Christmas gift for your favorite geek. Maybe next year?

TheGeneration writes: "Power shortages in San Francisco, and Silicon Valley have caused power providers to demand that Intel and other tech industry biggies to use less power. Things may get bad enough that rolling blackouts have been warned. The story is reported by the AP. "

AFCArchvile writes: "Have you ever wondered just what goes on at your DSL ISP's Tech Support center? East Bay Express Online has an article written by Erika Donald, a staffer at the Pacific Bell Internet Call Center: 'Finally, the customer is transferred to me. "Are you a supervisor?" he demands instantly. Since the beginning of the month, everyone in the call center has been transformed into a supervisor. Brian sleeping at his desk is now a supervisor. Ian with purple hair gelled into points is a supervisor. Ron who begged not to be made a supervisor is a supervisor. I am hoping next month, whoever decided to make us all supervisors will make us CEOs.' This is an almost Orwellian tale that should send a wake-up call to all the DSL ISPs."

dhart asks: "Does anyone make low power servers or desktop computers? Couldn't this be accomplished with commodity parts designed for portable PCs. Energy efficiency is environmentally friendly, with the added benefit of smaller and cheaper UPS and AC units in a server setting. If the demand for these units increased, it could lower the cost of energy efficient parts and, by association, the portable computers that drive the technology."

A few more bits about ICANN's latest meeting, where they picked several new .tld's: The BBC has a report about the demands made by ICANN upon country-code registrars. They seem pretty peeved about not having any voice whatsoever within ICANN. Ted Byfield has some good coverage of the meeting itself, distilled down from his roving_reporter column for TBTF.

nickovs writes "The BBC report that the worlds first commercial power station powered by ocean waves has gone on line. Built by WaveGen, who have issued this press release, the system uses the swell from waves reaching the shore to force air through a Wells Turbine which has the neat property that it turns the same direction irrespective of which way the air flows through it. According to WaveGen "It has been estimated that if less than 0.1% of the renewable energy available within the oceans could be converted into electricity it would satisfy the present world demand for energy more than five times over". Now wouldn't that be nice?" Nice trick.

davejhiggins writes: "In this ruling a French judge has upheld an earlier ruling ordering Yahoo! to ban French users from buying Nazi memorabilia from its auction site. Even though the content is not accessible from www.yahoo.fr/ the ruling insists that even "the visualization in France of these objects" on the www.yahoo.com auction site constitutes a breach of French law and orders Yahoo to bar all French IPs from accessing it despite Yahoo's assertions that this would not guarantee that nobody in France would be able to see it." This kind of stuff annoys the hell out of me.

Tom West asks: "In Canada, the leading opposition party, the Canadian Alliance has proposed that the government be legally obligated to hold a referendum on any issue that has a petition with at least 3% of the electorate signing. In response, 'This Hour has 22 Minutes', a political comedy show, has started a net petition demanding a referendum to have Parliament force Stockwell Day, leader of the Canadian Alliance, to change his name to 'Doris'. The petition started on Monday and has proceeded mostly on word of mouth (until today, when it hit just about every major newspaper (like this one from Globe and Mail). As of today, over 500,000 people have signed, closing quickly on double the number of people required. Humourous indeed, but what does this mean for the possibility of future petitions?"

"If gaining names and addresses of people to support any proposition, ludicrous or not, is this easy, does this mean an end for using petitions to force referenda, as is common in many states?

While absurd referenda are unlikely to pass, what happens when they get put on the ballot? Incendiary issues, normally silent because their few supporters are too scattered to get heard, can suddenly see their issues gain widespread attention. Regardless of the impossibility of passing, a lot of damage to the community could be occur."

Daemosthenes points to this Washington Post article, which reads in part: "America Online Inc. is negotiating a deal to give its long-standing nemesis Microsoft Corp. access to Time Warner Inc.'s cable-television lines in a push to meet government demands over AOL's pending takeover of the media company, according to sources familiar with the matter. The rapprochement between AOL and MSN, Microsoft's online service, is a startling reversal of form for two fierce competitors offering rival online services and instant-messaging systems." The entangling alliances here are thicker than your average EULA, too -- the story points out some of the other tendrils which tie together several of the big ISPs, including one of mine (Earthlink).

code_rage writes: "An article in the Washington Post says that some 160 employees and contractors of the CIA are being investigated for operating an unauthorized chat room. Two of those accused are "innovative, out-of-the-box, unconventional thinkers - these are essentially the hackers of the CIA, in the most positive sense of the word." The article raises issues of national security, workplace monitoring, and worker's legal rights. Although security was not compromised in this case, the prospect of unauthorized software running on secure computers might be a little troubling. The article says that senior employees have a keystroke monitor installed on their computers. The 5-day timeline demanded by The Company for response to accusations, seems to preclude the employees the ability to consult with legal counsel, given that clearances take months to be approved."

Christopher Thomas writes "A common theme in science fiction is the "replicator"; a device that can build anything on demand. An extension of this idea is the self-replicating factory, that grows in size geometrically to produce goods or to terraform hostile environments. It turns out that both of these miraculous devices are closer than they seem - in fact, to some extent they're already here. I've posted an article summarizing things."

theancient1 asks: "With malls already decorating for Christmas, it's time to start thinking about gifts. Since MP3 players are making their way onto more people's lists this year, I thought this would be an excellent time to get a round-up of the current state of SDMI with respect to current hardware. Are any players currently looking for a watermark within a standard MP3 file? What restrictions do current players have on what I do with my music? To what extent are the popular vendors caving to the demands of the recording industry? Numerous vendors are advertising their players as 'SDMI compliant to allow you to download music from major labels.' How can we get the message across that SDMI is not a feature without a price? I'm looking for some good Web resources for the average non-geek consumer."

Jason Bennett contributed this review of the depressingly named Death March : The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving " Mission Impossible" Projects. But if you're ever part of a software project which seems to be going nowhere fast, and over very rocky roads, perhaps the words he's written will point you to a source of solace. This book seems to have some decent strategies for dealing with impossible demands and even more impossible deadlines. And while no book will give you a better boss or timetable, at least you'll know you're not the only one.

Death March author Edward Yourdon pages 218 publisher Prentice Hall rating 8 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 0-13-014659-5 summary Another excellent effort by Yourdon that gives insight into the "doomed to fail" project.

Background Ed Yourdon has a long and storied publishing history, most notably for his books on structured design and his duology (is that a two book series?) Decline and Fall of the American Programmer and The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. Of course, he's better known recently for his (somewhat apocalyptic) Y2K books. This one, of course, is a couple of years old, but like most of the books I tend to gravitate to, addresses themes that endure. In this case, the desire to do more with less. The Scenario

Death March: [A project] whose "project parameters" exceed the norm by at least 50%. [The metaphor is used to suggest] a "forced march" imposed upon relatively innocent victims, the outcome of which is usually a high casualty rate. (2)

Yourdon's definition, as related above, does not necessarily imply a long-term project (although long-term death marches are worse than short-term ones), but instead describes a project with a low rate of success and a high personal impact. The project is either underfunded, underscheduled, understaffed, overfeatured, or some combination of the above. The introduction deals with the reasons DM projects happen, and why people actually agree to work on them. Having been on one myself, I can say that "ego" is one of the major reasons.

The subsequent chapters deal with various facets of the death march project, and how those facets are unique in such a project. Chapter 2, politics, has an especially interesting section on identifying what type of DM project one is on, and the chances of success for such a project. Yourdon rates projects on a four-quadrant scale: low and high likelihood of success, and low and high happiness factor (giving four combinations). Suffice to say, there are good combinations, bad combinations, and worse combinations. :-)

Chapter 3 deals with an important part of any project, but one that is hypercritical for any death march project: negotiation. Needless to say, good negotiation can turn a DM project into an almost-normal project, while bad negotiation can turn a bad situation into a nightmare. Yourdon provides some excellent tips on how to deal with upper management in these situations, which should be useful even if you've negotiated for a standard project before. Clearly, management is going to be much less forgiving in a DM situation.

Chapter 4 deals with "peopleware" issues in death march projects. As with negotiation, nothing really changes from a standard project to a DM project, but everything is emphasized. If you have poor workspace when you're on a normal deadline, consider how that workspace will affect you when you're under extreme time pressure. Overtime, and the limits of such, are another important issue Yourdon deals with.

Chapter 5 deals with an issue I've addressed many times in my reviews: process. I greatly appreciate Yourdon's take on process in a DM project. Simply put, while the Methodology Police will make any DM project worse, the lack of process will completely destroy one. Don't try to do all the paperwork while you're cramming to get the software out the door, but abandoning process will insure your failure. Things like requirements management and configuration management are all the more critical on a likely-to-fail project. If you lose only a week to a requirements change, that might be a quarter of your schedule!

Chapter 6, tools, simply reminds us that technology will not solve the human problem of programming. No CASE tool or supercompiler is going to come along to write your DM software for you. Use what you are most comfortable with, and you'll be the most productive.

The concluding chapter 7 proposes an interesting scenario: what if death march projects were to become normal? That is, how do you live and work rationally in an environment that is irrational? Suffice to say, this impacts everything about a software team, including the people who are hired and how careers advance within the company.

Throughout the book, Yourdon includes some excellent footnotes taken from correspondence with various software practitioners. These email excepts, gleaned from a questionnaire Yourdon sent out about the book's subject, give excellent insight into the nature of a death march project.

Although few people actually want to be sucked into a death march project, it will likely happen to most developers at some point in time or another. Being prepared for the occurrence might well mean your survival of such a project.

What's Bad/Good I found very little to dislike about this book. The text is concise yet thorough. The presentation is excellent. The ideas are reasonable and well-stated. I find Yourdon to be quite moderate in his position, neither justifying death marches nor railing against them overly. The advice on this book could easily be applied to any sort of project, and in fact is fairly standard in the literature, only ramped up for an intense, death march experience. Very little has changed in the industry since this book was initially published, and I doubt its timeliness will cease anytime soon. So What's In It For Me? If you write software, or work on any knowledge team, you will likely face a death march project at some point in your career. This book will help prepare you to deal with, and triumph over, such an experience. Table of Contents Preface

1. Introduction
2. Politics
3. Negotiations
4. People in Death March Projects
5. Processes
6. Tools and Technology
7. Death March as a Way of Life

Puchase this book from Fatbrain.com.

lim-bim-tim-wim writes: "The New Zealand government is planning to introduce powerful legislation to enable the Police, GCSB and Security Intelligence Service to hack into computers without the knowledge of the owner. Owners will also have to give up cryptographic keys and passwords on demand. ISPs and telecom companies will have to provide backdoors for government agencies. So how does this affect you? It appears this has been brought about by pressure from the FBI. So maybe your country is next. There is a short story at www.stuff.co.nz "

Wampamnstr asks: "In my organization (a mid sized non-profit hospital), it seems that every day the powers that be determine that yet another application/service is mission critical. Of course, they expect the tech workers to support it 24/7, yet fail to see the increased number of calls that are generated. I'm putting a proposal together to define where the problems lie, but I am looking for some feedback as to how other companies pay thier on call staff. The latest application they demanded that we support on a 24/7 basis is e-mail. One of our operating procedures dictates that no critical information is to be sent via e-mail, but they justify this by saying that e-mail is a integral part of what the users do for thier jobs. We'd love to support it, but any calls for e-mail support would result in the on call person being paged, which would increase the number of calls from 1-3 calls a week to closer to 20-30." Read on to learn about the companies current "on-call" payment scheme. Is this a fair way to compensate the workers providing the support?

"We have an 'on call pager' that each worker carries for 7 days, about once every 13 weeks, and the pager is only used between the hours of 5PM and 8AM. The person on call gets paid $60 for the week. If paged, and the on call person can walk the user through thier problem over the phone or via remote dialup the on call person gets paid nothing. Regardles of how many times they get paged and can fix the problem over the phone, or via remote dialup, they still get paid nothing. If the on call person has to go on site, they get paid an additional $60. However if they have to go on site more than once, they are limited to only getting the additional $60 once.

Simply put, the call volume will increase dramatically, as well as the after hours work load, but the organization isn't volunteering to pay us more. I'm looking to inform managent that the people who are on call know that the industry pays better than they are getting for the same type of work. So, I'm soliciting to find out exactly what other companies do."

Dean Siren asks: "Now that Apple has released the Quicktime 5 Public Preview, they've upgraded their video codec to Sorenson 3 from Sorenson 2 which Jeremy Neish says pales in comparison to MPEG4 and its derivatives. So, how well does Sorenson 3 compete against MPEG4 as far as quality per bitrate, processor demand, compression times, and streaming are concerned? Can Apple now stay ahead of DivX, Windows Media Player 7 and Real Player 8?" Neish notes that none of the latest codecs are not compatible with Unix so only Mac and Windows users get to take advantage of the latest in digital video formats. When someone gets around to fixing this, then I can again get excited about Quicktime, until then it's just another format to me (and yet another reason why I have to have a Windows box lying around).

Choosing the kind of work we do is one of the biggest decisions in anybody's life, especially for tech workers plunging into the new economy. But few make it carefully or well, argues a new book. Dilbert is the most accurate view of what many Americans really think about work. Workers are often betrayed by companies demanding higher productivity in exchange for less security. CEO salaries and managerial ranks mushroom; people work longer hours for less, thanks to technology; idiots get promoted all over the place. Work increasingly dominates rather than satisfies us, argues author Joanne B. Ciulla. You might want the take her short meaningful work quiz.

Decisions about work may be the biggest ones many of us ever make, And though career decisions are perhaps the biggest ones we face, we often make them unthinkingly, ignoring or perhaps unaware of the enormous consequences for our happiness, our peace of mind, the meaningfulness of our lives.

Our paradoxical culture -- particularly the tech part -- both celebrates work and continually strives to eliminate it. While this employers value efficiency above all other work traits, workers seek creativity -- interesting jobs that are lucrative and satisfying, that offer fulfullment and identify.

So Joanne B. Ciulla's very fine book The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, tackles a timely and nearly universal conundrum: Ciulla argues that many people have moved beyond a simple work ethic to let work engulf them and deprive them of a lot of the good things in life. It's dangerous, she says, that so many contemporary workers depend on their jobs as the primary wellsprings of individual self-esteem, when all the job asks of them is more work with less security.

This profound emphasis on work, says Ciulla, who has taught at Harvard and Oxford and is now an ethicist at the University of Richmond, is dangerous.

Companies have no qualms laying off, downsizing or exploiting thousands of workers but, contrary to popular belief, have not generally cut their management ranks. While companies savagely root out low and mid-level workers in order to stay lean and mean, executive salaries have shot through the roof. Ciulla cites research showing that U.S. managerial staffs have grown without interruption despite the loss of employment for millions of workers. What drives many workers to be more productive, Ciulla argues, isn't loyalty, a fierce work ethos or new tools of the booming hi-tech economy, but fear. They know they are vulnerable.

Commitment, loyalty and trust as bonds between employers and employees have nearly vanished. General cynicism about work permeates culture -- that's why "Dilbert" appears in 1,700 newspapers in 51 countries. The strip makes its way onto bulletin boards and refrigerator doors around the country; it's the voice and spirit of contemporary tech and office workers.

The reality is less amusing. Many workers feel exploited by their employers, writes Ciulla -- overworked, subject to dismissal or reductions, forced to work for idiots who are overpaid and perform too little. They face fundamental new issues about work and life. If the old social contracts of corporate America have been obliterated by the competitive demands of the new economy, where does that leave workers like Ciulla's character, identified only as Mary, whose company forces her to choose between putting in more time at work with no guarantee of reward, or working nine-to-five and having time to spend on things like her children and her church. "To do the latter may mean risking her job. More and more people find themselves in this bind," says Ciulla. And Mary's lucky she's not working for a Net start-up. "Such choices require reflection on what is important and how one wants to live his or her life."

In the tech world, as in others, these choices prove particularly tricky. Industries offer lots of jobs, many high-paying, so people tend to plunge into high-intensity employment before they even have a chance to consider life's other dimensions or the alternatives they might want to explore. Once employed, workers are tethered as never before to brutally competitive work environments and all sorts of techno-devices which keep them bound to their desks or jobs much of the time. Ciulla says many will come to regret not having considered their work choices more deliberately or seriously.

But they may not have had much time. Technology links people to their jobs more than was possible before. People are expected to remain constantly available via e-mail, cellphone and wireless gadgetry. The lines between work and "other things" people like Mary want to do grows blurrier over time, which means the consequences of choosing work poorly get bigger.

The Working Life looks at workplace innovations like flex time programs, which Ciulla calls the most radical management innovations of the century. Most management initiatives have been geared towards helping people fit their lives into work. Flextime promises some opportunity to shape work around one's life, if that's what workers want to do -- some opportunity.

The machines that Aristotle fantasized about have become the commonplace tools of everyday life in industrial society, Ciulla points out. Among other changes, technology means that work no longer involves being at a particular place at a regular time. Theoretically, we can be where we choose, although few companies trust their workers to do that.

Companies have betrayed their workers by making efficiency their paramount concerns. Workers can alter that reality by getting pickier about the the work they do and valuing non-work related activities more highly. We can, if we wish, choose to consume less and be less dependent on salaries. We can choose work that gives us mobility and independence. We can pursue other interests as intensely as we pursue job success.

Ciulla points out that this involves asking fundamental questions:

Do we know what kind of life we want? Are we willing to give up something for it? Is the life we have now worth what we are sacrificing for it?

Meaningful work is rare, says Ciulla, but it's there for people who really want to find it. A work-dominated life is perfectly acceptable, she says, if it satisfies the worker. But if it doesn't, "Then we should start thinking of how to fit work into our lives instead of fitting our lives into our work."

LordNimon was the first to write with "ZDNet has an article on how Motorola is demanding all of the private consumer data from each of its dealers, or the dealer will no longer be able to sell Motorola products. The article is unusually thorough for ZDNet. It includes comments from big Motorola customers who consider this data to be confidential and are furious over the plan. It also mentions that Motorola refuses to comment on the privacy aspect of the plan, or even acknowledge that there's anything wrong with it!" A very thorough look at behind-the-scenes marketing forces.

dameon asks: "I have been asked by my supervisor to select a replacement for our current SGI Onyx2 space heater. The current setup contains 24-195 Mhz IP27 processors, 12GB main memory, and around 140 GB of total storage space. We use it to run a bunch of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) code. Currently the demand on our system is so much that the jobs are backing up. So, they came to me with two quotes and said: "Which one is better?" I have had limited experience in the field of powerhouse number-crunchers. The two quotes I have received are from HP and SGI. SGI's quote is for: an Origin 3400 with 12 GB Memory, 24-400MHz/8MB R12K's, and 1/2 TB of storage space. HP is offering 3 9000 series N-4000's adding up to about the same specs in total, with the exception of the processors. Hp is offering 550 MHz PA8600's (1.5MB) processors in their setup (it also has more storage space setup with a hyperfabric configuration). All of the software we use will run on both platforms. So, I would like to put this to the Slashdot community: Which one is better?"

"The HP system is freaky expensive, but is the extra 150 MHz/processor worth the extra money? What else do I need to take into consideration? SGI's processors (while slower) have more cache. Overall, what do I need to look out for when spending this much money? What is the best deal? Am I missing another possible solution altogether? And yes, I already suggested a cluster of linux boxes similar to the one at Los Alamos, but the apps we use have no Linux support."

Mike Dubreuil writes: "When I went to download Red Hat Linux 7.0 for Sparc I was disappointed to learn RH is dropping support for the sparc processor line. They are claiming that there is a low demand for sparc versions This may be a major blow to the Linux community because Red Hat is the top vendor for commercial copies of Linux. Not to mention that they have the support in place to handle what large companies demand." Update: 10/02 09:43 PM by CT : Bernhard Rosenkraenz wrote in to say "It is true that we will probably not release Red Hat Linux 7.0 for sparc. However, this does NOT mean there won't be a Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2 for sparc. If, at some time, we decide to discontinue commercial sparc support, we will turn Red Hat Linux for sparc into a community effort."